Angel ,'Conviction (1)'
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
mac knows who Santa is, but I am not sure what he know wrt getting gifts. despite whatever it is, he will be told that Santa represents the spirit of giving at Christmas.
I think that's a good approach. I mean, if he hasn't had Santa bringing him gifts all these years? I think it would be very confusing.
Are you talking about adults? Seriously?Oh, no, which is why I started that paragraph with, "And on a totally silly note," and ended with the thing about Santa believers being cuter than the unbelievers, and it not being fair.
Santa was, and is, for my family mostly tradition. Even at 32, 26, and 25, cookies and carrots and a last minute letter are still left out for Santa and the reindeer. Santa stuffs the stockings, leaves wrapped presents, and leaves one present unwrapped.
The rule in our house was parents didn't get up until 8am on Christmas morning. My siblings and I were usually up around 6. We got to open our stockings and play with the unopened Santa gift. We still do it when we're all home for Christmas.
Once Em is old enough to understand, we'll probably do the same thing with her.
Oh, thank goodness. Your post makes so much more sense now. It does seem silly to me that I think no one (in my social circle) would expect me confirm the existence of Jesus if I didn't believe (although they might really want me to), but they expect me to play along with the whole Santa thing.
So, for people that grew up with Santa... were there presents under the tree before Christmas day? Did parents get presents? Did you get presents for siblings?
The rule in our house was parents didn't get up until 8am on Christmas morning. My siblings and I were usually up around 6. We got to open our stockings and play with the unopened Santa gift. We still do it when we're all home for Christmas.
For us it was 7am, though no one was allowed to open anything until my parents and all the siblings were there. My sister used to wake up at the crack of dawn and bounce around the house until it woke my mother up. My brother usually got up and around 6. At 7am my mother would start trying to get my father and I out of bed. It was a tossup which one of us would be the last one to finally drag our butts into the living room at 7:45, at which point my sister was nearly insane with anticipation.
Yes, there were parental and sibling and long-lost relative in Hawaii gifts already under the tree. And then on Christmas Day, the Santa gifts would arrive.
Which is another reason why I don't think I'd sell Santa to my kids; I couldn't afford it!
So, for people that grew up with Santa... were there presents under the tree before Christmas day? Did parents get presents? Did you get presents for siblings?
We had presents under the tree from our parents. My parents had presents for each other under the tree (well, my mother's gifts to my dad were there. Since my dad always waited until the absolute last minute to shop for my mom, her presents didn't show up there until Christmas morning), and once we got old enough, we siblings would get each other gifts as well. The presents to other family members who we would be seeing Christmas Eve and Christmas day also waited under the tree until they were packed into the car to go.
The Santa gifts, specially labled and wrapped, didn't get put out until sometime after all the kids had gone to bed the night before.
I grew up with "There is no Santa, but it's not nice to tell Christian kids that." I only broke that rule once -- a boy asked me what Santa was bringing me, and I said "nothing," and he told me that I must have been really bad if Santa wasn't bringing me anything, and started listing bad things I might have done. So I told him there was no Santa, and convinced him. He cried. (This was second grade.)
My mother said that one of the things that our fourth-grade teacher said, in a discussion about how my class was the worst class that any teacher could remember, was that, as an example of how immature we, collectively, were, she'd never seen so many fourth-graders who still believed in Santa.
Ah! In our house, the only presents under the tree prior to Christmas morning were the gifts from the siblings to our parents and from sibling to sibling.